The Phillies believe Johan Rojas can be ‘electric’ as a hitter. But there’s still plenty of work ahead.

His defense is elite, but Rojas’ bat remains one of the biggest questions going into the season. Can he hit enough to play every day?

Phillies center fielder Johan Rojas batted .170 in 18 spring training games.Read moreJose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer

by Alex Coffey

Published March 26, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Kevin Long and Johan Rojas talk a lot about the hitter they believe Rojas can be. Long, the Phillies’ hitting coach, says that when Rojas learns how to sequence his body correctly, he could have a swing like one of his teammates.

“Something like Trea’s swing,” Long said of Turner, the Phillies’ $300 million shortstop. “Where you’ve got a body that’s going to be able to create a lot of power. Be able to do some things to the baseball where you’ll go, ‘Man.’ ”

Rojas is not there yet. The 23-year-old batted .170 (9-for-53) this spring, but he made the opening-day roster mostly because of his elite defense in center field. His stat line wasn’t the only thing the Phillies were taking into consideration. They looked closely at his live at-bats, his decision-making, and his cage work throughout camp. And in those areas, Rojas and Long saw progress.

On March 11, Rojas took four live at-bats on the backfields against four major-league pitchers: Orion Kerkering, Seranthony Domínguez, Jeff Hoffman, and Spencer Turnbull. In all four, he held his new mechanics. Instead of leading with his hands, he led with his lower half. Instead of moving his head too much, he kept it more still.

After he was done, Rojas ran up to his hitting coach with a grin on his face.

“I did it! I did it!” he told Long.

Long was happy for him. Carrying proper mechanics into live at-bats — or even cage work — was something Rojas struggled to do at the beginning of spring. Long believes the fact that he’s doing it now is a sign he’s getting closer to what he calls “the end product.”

Turner agrees. A few weeks ago, he was watching Rojas take swings in the cage and turned to Long.

“Wow,” Turner said. “He’s got it.”

“Well, he’s got it here,” Long responded.

That is going to be the key for Rojas this season. He has yet to consistently maintain those mechanics in the major leagues, including Grapefruit League games. Long can tell by Rojas’ finish. If he leads with his hands, his finish is low. If he leads with his lower half, his finish is high.

More often than not, Rojas’ finish is low. The Phillies want him to be more stacked and centered, so he is in a good position to see the ball. Rojas chased 40.4% of pitches out of the zone in 2023 (the MLB average was 28.5%). This is another area in which he’ll need to show significant improvement. It will be hard for him to find consistent success in the big leagues without making better decisions.

“You want to see deep at-bats,” Long said in mid-March. “You want to see him battling, where he’s not ending at-bats real quick. There was a game the other day, probably a week ago, where he took a couple swings. He was coming in so steep with his hands, and he’s fouling balls off and they were catching them ...

“That’s what we’re trying to get rid of — that chopping swing. The timing is good, but he’s clipping balls instead of squaring them up. That’s progress from a week ago today. It’s actually much better than it was even a week ago.”

While his defense is elite, the Phillies will need Rojas to be serviceable at the plate. In his big league debut last season, he showed — albeit in a small sample — that he could hit at the big league level, batting .302/.342/.430 in 59 games. But that offense vanished in the playoffs when Rojas batted .093/.114/.163 in 43 at-bats.

There is still much to prove, but Long believes that this spring will help guide Rojas in the right direction. He is starting to realize what works for him and what doesn’t, and there is value in that. Just before those four at-bats on March 11, Rojas and Turner had a discussion about his two-strike swing.

Turner noticed that Rojas was better able to lead with his lower half when he used his two-strike swing, as opposed to a regular swing. He encouraged Rojas to use it before two strikes. Since then, he’s used a hybrid of his regular swing and his two-strike swing that is simpler and closer to the hitting position.

He said it has been a good change for him.

“That’s the game plan, even when I’m not in two-strike situations,” Rojas said. “I’m going in with that approach of shortening up the bat. Having that kind of swing. It puts me in a better position to make better contact, with a better angle, and have rhythm in my hands. That’s what I’m working on right now in all the games.”

Said Turner: “It was more so pointing out to him that sometimes, when you’re in the box, you think you’re doing something when really, you’re not. I think he really likes his two-strike swing, and it looks really good in the cage. So I was trying to get him to realize that he can hit like that before two strikes.

“Just trying to get him to feel what he wants to feel, because he’s going to be good for us. That’s what I appreciate about Rojas. He’s so young, and there’s a little bit of a language barrier there, but he wants to learn and wants to talk hitting, and he watches guys hit a lot. And you don’t really see that with young kids, especially big prospects.”

Long would be the first to say that Rojas is not a finished product. He said he’d give Rojas’ at-bats and mechanics a “B-minus.” But he is taking a holistic look at the young hitter’s body of work, and thinks he is on the right path.

“He deserves a lot more credit than people are giving him,” Long said. “They’re evaluating him on a superstar scale, and he’s going to be that, I think. I think he’s got the capabilities to be a really, really good and talented player for a long time. I like where he’s at. I like where he’s going to be. But I can’t wait till the end product.

“When he learns how to use and sequence his body the right way, it’s going to be pretty electric, and I feel like it’s just around the corner. I always tell him — it could be today. It could be next week. It could be a month from now. I don’t know, but I feel like it’s gong to be within the next month. I talk to him about this all the time. The end product is not here. But I think when it does get here, it’s going to be pretty special.”